Nature and Nurture
by shakespeare's sister
Summary: Silly oneshot. Snape isn't overly impressed with Lupin's cats, and rightly so, as one of the kitties has a secret. T for a little swearage.


'Sherlock! Mycroft! Little kitty! Come here and have some delicious dinner, chaps!'

'You spoil those cats,' Severus Snape told Remus Lupin disdainfully.

'I do not,' Remus retorted. 'They just need love like everyone else.'

'Cats do not need love. They are solitary animals who value their independence and merely utilise gullible humans who provide a food source without needing something in return.'

'Oh, you think I should be sending them out to earn their keep?' queried Remus.

'Of course not. But cats are animals who have been bred into uselessness. Wild cats are fearsome predators who hunt down their prey without mercy. House cats are lazy sleek creatures who snooze their days away in whatever comfortable place they can find.'

'I don't think little kitty is a lazy sleek creature. She's certainly able to take care of herself. I just don't want her to have to. I want her to have a nicer life.'

'Since you adopted her, she has lost her purpose, her drive. Her Darwinian instincts, to borrow from muggles. She know longer faces the struggle for survival that all species must undergo in order to evolve into something superior.'

'So, you object to me having cats as pets (if you can ever 'have' a cat, rather than just feed and house it - see, I agree with you there!) on the basis that I am stagnating their species? Because of me, feeding them, they will not either survive and breed, or die before their traits are passed on, but may have offspring whether or not they have desirable characteristics?'

'Quite.'

'Severus. That is ridiculous.'

'Why? What on earth is ridiculous about that?'

'What do you care about some tiny evolutionary step for cats?'

'It is a purely intellectual problem that I have. I like to know that evolution continues, and that humanity is not stultifying it.'

'Balderdash,' said Lupin rather rudely (he was reading Thackeray).

'I beg your pardon?'

'Piffle. Hogswash. Baloney, as I believe our transatlantic cousins say. Nonsense. Bollocks. Poppycock. Actually, I read an interesting fact. Poppycock is derived from the Dutch, _pappe kak_, meaning "soft shit". Isn't that rude?'

'Lupin, what are you maundering on about?'

'I know exactly why you think that Sherlock and Mycroft and little kitty are freeloading off me.'

'Oh, please enlighten all four of us.'

'You're jealous.'

Snape sputtered like a boiling kettle.

'Oh yes you are. You think I don't have enough love to go round. Admit it.'

'I certainly will not! I, feel something so irrational and so patently ridiculous!'

'Severus is jealous, isn't he, little kitty? Even though he has no reason to be,' Remus crooned to the tiny black and white scrap who he had found starving in the garden a month ago.

When he had picked the cat up it had scratched and bit him until he had to use a freezing charm so he could clean its many wounds. It had taken all that time since then but now it was finally coming round to the idea of being looked after by this shabby individual who smelt of wolf and yet did not look like one.

'You ought to name that cat if you're going to keep it and indulge it like you do the others,' said Snape, looking down at 'little kitty' with a more tolerant condescension as she vied for her place at the food bowl with the somewhat tubby tortoiseshells Sherlock and Mycroft.

'Oh, I - er, I will. Soon.'

'Jealous!' Snape muttered incredulously under his breath, and departed the kitchen to no doubt try and find some evidence for his disdain of domesticated cats.

'It's our secret, your name, isn't it?' Lupin said with a conspiratorial smile down at the kitten.

The moment he had first been clawed by it, he knew what he wanted to call it. Somewhat gender-inappropriate, perhaps, and he was still trying to find the right moment to break it to him, but the feline Severus bore such an uncanny resemblance to the spiky potions master that he simply could not resist.


End file.
